


A Mare Black and Shining

by bachlava



Category: War Horse (2011)
Genre: M/M, Post-World War I, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-30
Updated: 2012-06-30
Packaged: 2017-11-08 20:41:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/447341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bachlava/pseuds/bachlava
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What the war has not taken, the Spanish Flu has. Nicholls and Singh look for a way through the aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mare Black and Shining

**Author's Note:**

> (Post-)Edwardian social realities.
> 
> Special thanks to halfdutch (LJ) for beta-reading. Any remaining errors are my own. Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.

  


 

_Bridgeton ___

_____Kingsmarkham, Somerset_

_____20th May 1921_

_  
_

_My dear Jim,_

_  
_

_Your penmanship has deteriorated of late; I couldn’t tell whether your last missive was addressed to Maj Gen James Stewart or some unfortunately named female relation. Perhaps you were going over a bad stretch of rails when you wrote it on the envelope? In any event, I managed to determine that it had indeed reached its intended recipient._

_I’m glad to hear you’re keeping well and to report that the same remains true of me. You really might consider returning to our safe and pleasant green, at least for a summer’s visit. I confess that I am at this moment averse to travelling, although I suppose I will warm again to the prospect in time._

    _In answer to your queries: So far as I can determine, none of your relations are deceiving you when they write that they are in good health, &c. There’s no shortage of bats in your aunt Tilda’s belfry, but then there never was. _

    _Your recounted in your last letter the exchange you once had with Lt Waverly about the military use of dress hats. That brought Charles’ memory to the forefront of my mind. Naturally it’s one that brings sadness to us both, but I do have a bit of good news. His sister Agnes is in good health after the birth of a robust little infant, which has been christened Charlotte. She swears the girl is very like her namesake. I find that one baby looks more or less like another, but you’ll of course humour the beaming mother when you write her._

    _Last week I had the good fortune to attend the opening of a London exhibition with some of your paintings. They were well received on the whole, and at least some of the spectators seemed to take your meaning, although not all share your sentiments. Naturally your war paintings were considered unpatriotic by some, primarily by those who sat out the war. (They are the same people who consider that I failed to do my bit, as if I chose to spend four years as the guest of the Kaiser.) Others grumbled that you probably sympathise more with Mr Gandhi than with our own Parliament. I believe they meant it as a criticism._

    _The crowd from school of course couldn’t be large, but old Burton from Geography was up. He hasn’t changed a whit in fifteen years; I don’t imagine even death will have much of an effect on him. His eyesight must be going in any event, because he spoke not a word about your or any other paintings. Rather, he took the remarks on your politics as an invitation to condemn "India’s maltreatment of its women," which led him to clarify that he does of course oppose the legal emancipation of England’s, female admission at universities, &c. Perhaps the minutiae of latitude and longitude have driven him mad at last._

    _Including sketches with your correspondence does seem to be an incorrigible habit with you! There are far worse ones to indulge. I’m afraid I don’t quite see your fascination with the local ponies. That many of them are born pacers like those once bred here I understand, but the curving in of the ears’ tips seems entirely unnatural. Your mare may be as lovely as you say -- how did she come by that name of hers? -- but surely you ought to have something better._  
  
 _There’s a final bit of news that I must mention or else sin by omission, being newly at liberty to speak of it. In your last letter you made mention of our Lt Singh from Quiévrechain. Has he learnt yet that the generals knew, back in ’14, that the Germans had invented mechanized artillery? We did not conceive of what it meant until we faced it, but I knew on the eve of that charge that we might encounter some weapon that his reconnaissance men could not have known existed to be looked for._

_I shall not ask your forgiveness, Jim, nor his. The war has left all of us with too much to forgive._

_  
_

_Yours, as ever,_

___Jamie_

_  
_

 

Nicholls wakes well before dawn and knows at once that he’ll not get to sleep again. It’s always difficult to rest properly when he’s just returned from travelling. It’s too early to be up and about, so he goes through his regime of calisthenics by the last of the moonlight.   
  
When the first hints of dawn appear, he dresses and makes his way to the stables and brings his horse out as quietly as he can. It takes little time to brush her and attend to her hooves. Were it a little later, a groom might try to dissuade Nicholls or even take it as an aspersion on his own competence. But Nicholls has always enjoyed grooming his own mount and now makes the habit of military discipline his excuse: one must be ready for those times when no groom is available. That he finds it soothing is closer to the heart of it, but the stable-hands would no more hear the affairs of his heart than he would share them. He nevertheless appreciates those occasions when no argument is necessary.  
  
Lonnie snuffs at his ear. “Eager to go, are you?” Nicholls asks, patting her shoulder. He leads her over to the mounting-block, the cavalry officer in him feeling as he always does a small rush of humiliation at being reduced to using one. Lonnie stands at least a hand shorter than any of the hunters of Nicholls’ youth, long-legged horses that he could mount without lowering the stirrup. The men and even the women he hunted with would laugh to see him now.   
  
But then, Nicholls would no longer find much sport in chasing a frightened creature to its death. Perhaps the bad leg is the least he deserves.  
  
Well, he mustn’t get maudlin in ruing what’s done and can’t be undone. He forces all thought of foxes from his mind as he guides Lonnie to the roadway, which still appears as little more than a smudge in the darkness. There, he urges her forward and she falls into her natural pacing stride. It’s an easy gait to ride, but it takes more practice to ride it perfectly, as Nicholls intends to do.  
  
As they go along, a bit more light seeps into the world. On rougher ground, where he slows Lonnie’s pace, he can make out a few small birds whose song he hears rising as that of frogs and crickets fades for the day. In the irrigated fields the day’s work is beginning: women and a few men emerge to toil for the profit of rich men who have never worked the land. It’s a different sort of landscape to the apple orchards and sheep farming of Nicholls’ youth in Somerset, but that unfairness in the whole operation seems the same everywhere.   
  
That too he pushes from his mind. The countryside is soothing, and his mind needs soothing after weeks spent in the chaos of a city. Now is not the time to dwell on circumstances that he can do nothing to change. He focuses on the dry grounds they pass through, which still appear empty of people. There’s a smell in the air that he recognizes from the previous year but cannot place: some crop in bloom, he supposes, or a sign of coming storms. He’ll ask about it later today, if he remembers.  
  
Lonnie is in high spirits, and on the return he gives her her head. Although she’s a born pacer, she’s not at all bad at a gallop, and today she fancies one. Nicholls feels as close as he reckons a man can to flying. Kalonji seems to outrun the very dust she kicks up, and James laughs for the joy of riding such a fine horse. He expects she’ll maintain the gallop as long as he or the ground allows: she lacks neither energy nor endurance.   
  
In fact, she comes to a dead stop with no warning, giving Nicholls a bad jolt. But he sees at once what has halted her and is glad she stopped without his having to pull her up.   
  
A snake is in the centre of the road, not going across it but coiled there. Nicholls shudders at the sight of it but keeps his wits about him. That the snake is coiled in such plain sight means it’s caught the scent of something, very likely a mongoose, where it intends to go. That it has not gone back means that it is fleeing something there -- another mongoose, James thinks, and at a brief glance confirms it. The snake rises up and flares its hood.  
  
No cobra in fact quails before a mongoose, he has learnt. But its courage, if it is courage, is of no more use than its venom.  
  
He entertains a brief, desperate wish to wheel Lonnie away, to screw his eyes shut and cover his ears. He must do neither, and he reminds himself that he dislikes serpents. Kalonji’s ears are flat against her neck. It’s for her sake that Nicholls must not look away when the snake abandons courage in favour of flight. A mongoose falls upon it before it can slither its own length.  
  
There is blood, of course, and thrashing. And, in its death throes, the snake hissing,  _hissing --_  
  


\-- hissing, the canisters were still landing, and James was all but blinded, the gas burning through his throat, his lungs on fire. He made a last, desperate fumble for his  mask and managed to fasten it on; a masked groom guard had just outfitted Sinon. They would survive the gas this time but the pain was no less, he should have left the mask off, he wished for death.   
  
He was in agony, the very air no air at all but clouds of poison. All around him was a mine-strewn wasteland of barbed wire and mud and shit, and when the mustard cloud was gone he would be signaled to skirt a course around it and take his sword to Germans in an artillery unit. He’d feel the bodies crack and mash under Sinon’s feet and hear the sounds made by men and horses who were not yet dead.   
  
But  _he_  was dead. He no longer struggled against his fate. He was in Hell; he had died on his first charge, and for his sins he was condemned to imagine that instead the Sikh Regiment’s reconnaissance had found him still breathing on the battlefield afterwards, that he was nursed back to enough health to be returned to the fray. He could not think what transgression had earned him this punishment, a thousand murders could not merit it, yet he was sentenced to shed more blood --  
  
The whistle sounded, and it was up the ladders for the men, into the mud for him and Sinon. Even through the mask he smelled death and the dying, which drowned out the scent of smoke and metal. He put Sinon to an unsteady canter over the festering ground.   
  
How many of the dead did they ride over? Hundreds? Thousands? How many more did they ride towards, and how many of those would die by Nicholls’ hand? Did he and Sinon cover a furlong or a league? There was barbed wire everywhere, it no longer mattered who set it up, they were all creatures made of mud --

  
\--and then another hissing, different to the first, a bright light followed by a great sound. Sinon shied away, too late, and Nicholls was flung into the air and then he fell, feeling nothing. Smoke swirled before his eyes; he did not know if they were open or closed. He tried to move, to get his bearings, and then there was pain, terrific pain, and the world went red --

  
  


He’s draped over Lonnie’s neck, the sun starting to beat down on him. Both feet have fallen from the stirrups, but he hasn’t been unhorsed; for that he’s grateful. When the shaking has subsided enough he resumes his proper seat and has Lonnie walk on, having learnt from experience not to attempt anything faster. Once they’ve returned, he doesn’t resist Fahim’s attempt to help him from the saddle, although he declines to be helped to the house. Even if he is unsteady, he can walk, and so he shall. The alternative is to allow himself to go to pieces.  
  
He gives all his attention to his environment: a quiet day, clear air, dry ground under his feet, the house ahead of him. Inside, he retreats to his study and pours himself a brandy. There is pain in his leg with no cause, and so he remains standing while he nurses the drink. Yielding to disorder of the nerves is but a step down the path of letting them destroy you. This he believes as firmly as he can.

  
Nicholls closes his eyes and tries to let the relative cool of the study refresh him. The house is quiet, as it usually is. It’s a circuit house built in somewhat anglicized imitation of the great haveli palaces, like a squire’s house imitating a castle, put up in a peculiar effort to accommodate travelling officials. It fell into disuse after the rail station was built on the opposite side of the city, and in time the enterprise was abandoned and the property sold off. Someone in Singh’s maternal family eventually and rather magnanimously accepted it as payment for a debt. Nicholls has lived here, he supposes as a painter in residence, for going on two years.

  
Someone tiptoes into the room, the staff having learnt to recognize those times when Nicholls prefers silence. It’s probably Sachin with breakfast; Nicholls can smell the tea. Without turning round he dismisses with thanks whoever has brought it. Another brandy holds more appeal than the tray, but he tamps down that impulse as well. He must calm himself at least enough to take some sustenance, or else regret it later.

  
Breakfast is toasted bread and a bit of fruit cooked with ginger, all that Nicholls is usually able to stomach on difficult mornings. There’s a  _Times of India_  a couple of days old along with it, and he reads it in an attempt to divert his thoughts. The German mark is showing an alarming decline, he learns, while the League of Nations is undertaking great endeavours in hydrography. There is news of Michael Collins that makes Nicholls happier than it will many of his countrymen. The English are a race of despicable men unable or unwilling to rule even their vilest impulses, yet still they would claim the right in ruling other nations as they please.

  
It seems likely that Ireland will have her freedom within the year. India, Nicholls fears, will be denied hers for some time to come. Hopes raised at the start of the war, such as Singh harboured, have been dashed bitterly. India is too rich a prize to be given up so easily, far richer than Ireland had been even before she was plundered. Nor is it a matter of indifference to the Crown and commons, Nicholls knows, that Ireland practices a religion more akin to Britain’s own (the click-click-click of rosaries in the pockets of the RCs, who Mullen would assemble for that devotion), that their own language has been more nearly stamped out, that they have lighter skin (Mullen was milk-pale; he’d been burnt when they found him in the August heat so he must have held on for a few hours, Nicholls broke his hands to wrap the beads round them).

  
He sets the newspaper down by his half-finished breakfast and goes into his studio. He puts on canvas what’s in his mind, what paints itself across his vision whenever he closes his eyes. There’s no conveying them exactly; Nicholls is both grateful and sorry for that. The memory is a film reel in grotesque colour and accompanied by sound that a painting can barely hint: shells, bullets, footfalls in the mud -- and the smells: filth, fear, decaying bodies and corpses-to-be.

  
He consults the studies he’s made of the scenes that have been haunting him lately. His mind becomes more eased as he begins the underpainting on a canvas he’s got primed and ready. Subtle gradations of shade and texture command all his attention. The underpainting is a secret shared between painter and painting, one that will affect profoundly what all others see but will never itself be seen by them. Nicholls occasionally longs to keep a canvas only underpainted and hang it in some room only visited by him. 

  
He goes on with the task until it becomes uncomfortable to remain standing. He sits only to make studies and sketches, as he did that poor doomed horse seven years ago, a gift for one doomed, stupid boy among the millions.

  
That’s another thought he must push aside for now. He devotes his attention to tidying up and then to Jamie’s letter. It was one of a few that had arrived too close to his return to be forwarded on to him, and the only one to which he’s not yet replied. He sets himself to the task and nearly begins writing in the wrong alphabet. The Gurmukhi script still gives him difficulty, so he disciplines himself to use it whenever he corresponds with anyone who knows it. It makes at least the immediate practicalities easier that Jamie does not.

 

_New Jind City Circuit House_

___Jind, India_

___15th June 1921_

 

_Jamie,_

_  
_

_My penmanship has not deteriorated in the slightest. It’s your judgment that I fear is affected. You say that you are keeping well and in the next breath that you have recently spent time in old Butler’s company. The two are quite incompatible. It was said in my house that Butler died during the Restoration and, having been turned away by St Peter, proved too tedious for the devil to endure. I daresay any member of the local women’s improvement society could drive a stake through his heart._

_I’m glad to know that  Mrs Hastings -- I must still remind myself that she is no longer little Agnes Waverly -- and the child are well. I’ve sent my congratulations and reported that you had told me exactly what Mrs Hastings doubtless hoped you would. I really do hope that little Charlotte comes to resemble her uncle. It would lift her mother’s spirits, for one thing._

_The shape of the local horses’ ears is, I assure you, as natural as their pace. Both can be observed in foals not three days old. Legend in Rajputana has it that they were once exclusively the mounts of warrior-princes, etc., although I receive horse-tales everywhere with a great deal of skepticism. Whatever the truth, the preference for English horses that has been introduced even in the princely states is a morbid one. Our cobs and Thoroughbreds are entirely unsuited  to the climate. When your appetite for travel returns you will have to come and see these creatures for yourself._

_Kalonji is at least as lovely as I say. Her name is the local one for blackseed. Horses seem to bear the same names everywhere; I doubt there is a stable in the world lacking a Ginger, Star, etc. As for horses better than my own lass, I wager that I have ridden half a dozen. I have shot perhaps five times that number._  
  
  
He stops to refill his pen and reads what he has just written. The pen full, he blots out the final lines.

  
The day has just entered its hottest stretch, when tempers become strained and it’s necessary to lie down out of the sun. The servants will be in their own quarters by now, and Nicholls goes to his as quietly as possible. He will sleep, and perhaps dream, or else he will rest and certainly remember.

  
  
  


He was no longer in Hell.  
  
This was Purgatory, perhaps -- he’d learnt Dante better than the Articles of Faith. The pain was still present sometimes, but dull, almost distant.   
  
Then came a new pain, one of coughing until his throat was raw, of fighting to draw breath, his head throbbing. He was attended by figures in white -- angels, perhaps? The men he’d killed? They spoke, but he rarely understood them. The reconnaissance officer who pulled him from the field at Quiéchevrain spoke to him as well. So he was dead too. Nicholls had forgotten him in the intervening years. His words were intelligible, Nicholls thought, but so far away that he could not make them out.  
  
Metal was poked under his tongue, then replaced by something bitter-tasting. Pain came and went. Nicholls slept.  
  
And then he woke, slowly, as if emerging from a winter’s den of white cloth and morphine.   
  
His first thought was that it was warm, his second that he was very thirsty. He tried to speak through cracked lips but failed. He tried again. “Water.” His voice was still weak. “Please. Water.”  
  
There was a sound of someone rising, of pouring, and then a glass was thrust into his hand. The water was warm and felt still, but Nicholls drank as if it was cool and sweet. Whoever had poured the glass refilled it, and Nicholls drained it again, wanting still more but knowing he must wait. “Thank you,” he murmured.  
  
“You are welcome.”  
  
That voice. He opened his eyes, blinking against the light. “Singh?” he asked uncertainly, and uselessly.  
  
But the man leaned closer, and Nicholls saw that he was right. “Gurkiran Singh, yes.”  
  
“Where am I?” he asked.  
  
“In an Allied hospital.”

 

Nicholls felt a rush of relief and realized he had been afraid. “When is it?” he asked.

  
“The first day of summer. 1918.”  
  
“I’ve been here nearly a month?”

  
“Yes. You’ve woken every day, but the morphine and the other medicine... Well, you are stronger now. You need less of them.”  
  
“Or the supply is nearly out.”

  
“There would be much more screaming and coughing if that were the case.”  
  
He was no doubt speaking from experience; Nicholls did not want to contemplate it. “What about you?” he asked.  
  
“I was hit with gas in one of the early engagements in Neuve Chapelle, before we were prepared for it. I survived, but when I came round the Germans had me.”  
  
“You were taken prisoner?”  
  
“Yes.” As if anticipating Nicholls’ question, he went on, “I had been promoted to lieutenant by then, so I was put in officers’ detention. It was not altogether inhumane. I gather the some of the enlisted men are receiving rougher treatment.”  
  
“I’m sure that’s so.” Nicholls wondered whether it was worse than anything that might have befallen Singh’s compatriots. The Sikh Regiments were deployed to the east not long after Neuve Chapelle, he knew. Since then one had heard rumours, some of them perhaps erroneous but in the aggregate certainly not encouraging.   
  
This was not an opportune moment for the subject, Nicholls decided. He asked instead, “How did you come to be here?”  
  
“They’ve begun to exchange prisoners who won’t be able to fight again.”  
  
Nicholls glanced over him quickly; Singh looked to be in one piece. “The gas damaged your lungs?”  
  
Singh nodded. “Yes. This climate is no good for them. I might improve somewhat if I return home.” Seeing Nicholls’ expression, he said quickly, “That was not bad enough to put me in this hospital, but then I fell ill. Influenza, apparently, the same as you had.”  
  
“Influenza?”  
  
“The doctors think so.”  
  
“But it’s nearly July.”  
  
“They believe it is spreading nonetheless, and becoming more virulent as well.”  
  
‘Flu might breed in the trenches, Nicholls supposed. He knew worse things did. In any event, he was now breathing more easily than he had in a month. A more pressing concern was the effect of having drunk the water so quickly. “Excuse me for a moment.”  
  
“Let me find a nurse.”  
  
Nicholls grinned. “Surely I’m hale enough to get to the toilet on my own, Singh.” He pushed away the blankets and rose from the bed.  
  
Or he tried to do. He no sooner stood than he lost his balance, nearly falling to the floor before Singh caught him. A nurse rushed over, chiding him -- he supposed -- in French, and made to put him back into bed. Nicholls tried to remember his French in order to protest and planted his feet firmly on the floor, only to find that he couldn’t feel it properly.  
  
He looked down. His thighs were flat on the mattress, his right knee bent, his left knee --   
  
“Singh,” he said, forgetting the nurse, and he heard his own laughter, which seemed to come from outside himself. “Where is my leg?”

  
  
  


Nicholls wakes from half-sleep feeling again as if there’s pain in the leg that’s no longer there. He doubts the weather’s humid enough at this time of day to trouble his knee, even so close to the onset of the rains. The monsoons are a relief to him despite that discomfort, breaking as they do the heat, but Singh finds them difficult to endure. The thick air that comes with them makes it difficult for him to breathe, and being confined to the house in opaque air recalls circumstances he’d rather not dwell on.  
  
This is the worst time for Nicholls to indulge his nerves, then, although they are often agitated after he returns from one of the large cities. As a lad he’d enjoyed going up to London and visiting Paris. Now he feels that every city in the world is the same. They may be built by different architects, their inhabitants may speak different languages, but in every one of them are throngs of people pressing in like men packed in trenches; the oppressive hum of noise punctuated by assaultive bursts; desperate and greedy cabbies driving their horses into the ground; maimed men and drunkards begging for alms that he cannot give them lest he be crushed by a throng. His alms cannot help the teeming destitute, and there is no escape from the filth of man and industry.  
  
But he must tolerate them sometimes, and admit that the visits are not entirely burdensome. Simla, in the mountains, is a welcome respite during the hottest part of the year, and it’s there in the summer capital that he sells his paintings to collectors and art dealers. Winter visits to Delhi yield more commissions than are possible in Jind for equestrian portraits of the wealthier residents, while the larger population of humbler people, local and English alike, buys more of the smaller, sentimental works depicting India’s horsemanship.  
  
Nor is society entirely lacking in the cities. He’s not starved for it in Jind, of course, and Singh’s kin have become his friends, but in the capital cities there are a far greater number of old army men and nurses. Nicholls has found some measure of companionship among those with whom his political differences are not too great, those who live with the uncomfortable irony of benefitting daily and automatically from the order they oppose. Some of them, mostly officials, came to India believing that they might help to midwife an incipient independence. A few of them still do believe it, but more of them have become disillusioned, and willing to be of discreet help to Singh. Some have become his friends as well, the shared bond of war service made more urgent by the fact that so very few of the Sikh Regiment are left.   
  
Servicewomen are there as well, most of them now are nurses and schoolteachers, as well as a few lady scholars to match the gentlemen ones and the expatriate painters and poets. But more than a handful of the men, civil servants and artists both, share with Nicholls proclivities beyond the political. Some of them were drawn to India in part because the decency laws are no more enforced here than they are in Britain’s public schools. There’s a rumour that the Foreign Office, keen to avoid the trouble caused by over-familiarity with local women, in fact prefers inverts for certain posts.  
  
Nonetheless, it doesn’t do to court trouble in the manner of Oscar Wilde. The law in practice leaves Nicholls alone here, and courtesy dictates that he return the favour. So he travels singly, exchanging only superficial correspondence with Singh, and the hardships of cities are that much more difficult to bear for it. Singh could accompany him to Delhi or Simla only in the guise of an interpreter or some other assistant, as a servant, however glorified. Nicholls will never ask for that, just as Singh will never offer.   
  
The current separation will not last much longer. Singh pays visits to as many of his relatives as he can in the hot season, before the monsoons hinder travel. Last year he waited to return until the last minute, not wanting to contemplate the storms’ onset, but he returned in time nonetheless. He will do so this time as well.  
  
Perhaps Nicholls will have something more along the lines of a painting to show him by then. There’s enough light left in the day for him to complete the first phase of the underpainting. Afterwards he returns to the stable. Singh will want Tamba in good form when he returns. The grooms have been exercising him during Nicholls’ absence, of course, but he feels a peculiar obligation to Singh to take him out now that he’s home.   
  
Fahim makes to groom Tamba himself, adding, “Perhaps you should rest, sir.”  
  
“No, I’m quite all right, Fahim. Besides, you’re short-handed now, aren’t you?” The grooms are Moslems, and several of them are taking their holiday to celebrate the end of Ramadan.   
  
Fahim looks to be considering this, and Nicholls presses on: “I insist. You’ve already done more work today than it’s right to ask of anyone. Besides, he doesn’t look like he needs much grooming.”  
  
The last point is one that couldn’t be argued by anyone, and Fahim, accepting it, allows Nicholls to give Tamba the once-over in peace. He knows he’s unlikely to be granted it upon returning, when Tamba will be dusty and sweaty. The stable-hands justly consider English grooming tools less effective than the local ones, at the use of which Nicholls is not as proficient as they. He will have to content himself with whatever calmness the first brushing can provide.  
  
Once in the saddle, Nicholls disciplines himself to follow the same route he did in the morning. It’s after all unlikely that he’ll witness two snakes’ demises on the same day.  
  


The war produced even more rumours than corpses, and one of the rumours was true: the cough that spread everywhere was indeed the product of influenza.  
  
Men were brought in suffering from it. They were given medicine, sanitation, and rest, and in time they grew worse, not better, or many of them did. Nurses and orderlies who showed signs of it were sent home and only sometimes returned. Nicholls caught whispers among the recovered staff: a rheumatic child or a sick old man recovering, a hale mother-to-be succumbing. Europe, it seemed, did not mean for his generation to continue. Nature would finish whoever the war had not claimed. Among the newly admitted patients, Nicholls preferred those who were too short of breath for conversation. A stranger’s death was easier to bear than a comrade’s.  
  
Convalescence alongside officers who had survived the ’flu was more tolerable, though most of his fellows spoke only a Québec dialect that even the French nurses found difficult to comprehend. Nicholls and Singh had little society apart from one another’s. They spent hours talking, at first, about horses. Singh was well acquainted with those of England, having received education in that country, but Nicholls knew nothing of India’s. Singh, in the manner of those who love horses, was more than eager to tell.   
  
They shared stories of horses they’d known, old stories as they hardly knew they remembered as well as those better recalled. There must have been old memories that were painful for Singh to think of, as there were for Nicholls, but neither spoke of them. They both had too many new ones. England’s horses had been squandered years ago. Cavalrymen had become of less value than their mounts, both the few suitable ones remaining and the rest that filled the gap, regulations long forgotten. They were veterans of cab-pulling too devastated to shy from danger, fleet Thoroughbreds keen on galloping to their deaths, retired plow horses too large to ride and too old to go on, ponies that stood not fourteen hands and should have been ridden by children.  
  
And as often as not they were. Laws on the proper age for soldiering had become dead letter. The infantry was the worst for it, but even Nicholls had been given to command corporals who sat well on the ponies and lowered their stirrups to the last rung to mount horses. There was a trooper who hadn’t learnt a line of Chaucer, a groom guard too young to shave and another who feared he’d be punished for a nocturnal stain on his bedroll.  
  
Doubtless he had been, Nicholls had thought over his own embarrassment; perhaps the boy’s family belonged to one of the excessively severe religious sects. Whatever the reason for the boy’s -- Timothy’s -- shame, Nicholls had wished dearly that it had been someone else to discover the secretive attempt at laundering.   
  
It hadn’t, though, and so Nicholls had managed a kindly smile. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of lad. It happens to all of us from time to time.” Timothy had still stared at his feet, and Nicholls said, “Let it reassure you, in fact. Now you know that you can marry someday and have children.”  
  
Nicholls could not bear to speak of him, after.  
  
Instead, he told Singh about the pony he learnt riding on, a dappled grey thing called Pepper that his older brother Henry had outgrown. Pepper had been a gentle old soul by the time Nicholls outgrew him in turn, barely suitable even for his younger sister. Alice, after all, had never been without her courage. She'd joined the ambulance corps the minute the call came, and Henry of course had been ahead of James in the reserve Yeomanry.  
  
He mustn’t dwell on all that either. Singh tried to cheer him up. “What about your sweetheart, waiting to marry you when the war is over?”  
  
“Oh, I’ve never been the marrying sort,” Nicholls said, forcing himself to smile. “What about you, Singh? Surely you’ve got someone back home.”  
  
Singh’s laugh was quite genuine. “I have two sisters and three older brothers. There’s not enough money left for me to marry anyone my family would accept.”  
  
“The youngest son’s curse.”  
  
“Always,” Singh agreed. “Still, you must be as eager to return home as I am.”  
  
“I’m eager to leave France,” Nicholls replied.   
  
What else could he say to Singh, who had not had the benefit of leave? He had been back to England, yes, but not the England that he knew. What was there now was a land empty of young men and women, and ringing in the void was the patriotic fervour of the venerable and the comfortable who waged a war they did not fight. There was no one left save for old fools and maimed men and ghosts.  
  
India could be different, perhaps. Singh told him all about it, his boyhood in Ludhiana, the holidays with his mother’s family in Jind. To pass the time he taught Nicholls Punjabi, which Nicholls was gratified to acquire more easily than he had Greek. Even if the writing was slower going, he found a logic to the language itself. The gender and number of nouns followed a sensible order, the conjugation of verbs conformed to reason, and his accent progressed well enough that before long Singh could understand the sentences he pieced together. They whiled away long hours practicing at it, and began conversing in it as Nicholls improved.  
  
They walked the grounds as well, once Nicholls was steady enough on his alumnium leg to allow the company of anyone but an orderly. Singh began to recover his wind, though it was plain that his breath would never come as easily as it had before the war. Slowly he became more willing to acknowledge those times when he needed to rest rather than fight on, while Nicholls was surprised one day to find himself not too ashamed to ask for Singh’s assistance in covering uneven ground.  
  
They came together, the first time, without any conversation. By then it was habit for Singh to help Nicholls into bed, and one evening when the moon was bright, a look passed between them that confirmed something that had built up without being spoken of. They pressed their hands together even as Singh eased Nicholls onto the mattress and let go so that Singh, with a certain measure of caution, could recline beside him.  
  
Nicholls rested his fingers on Singh’s cheek. “You are beautiful.”  
  
Singh kissed him, lightly, and for a moment that brush of lips was everything in the world to Nicholls. Later they might touch one another with a feeling of urgency, but for as long as the physical fragilities were new they dictated caution. It was good simply to look Singh in the eye without Nicholls’ having to avert his gaze, for them to run their fingers in circles over one another’s skin, with no pretense that this might be new to either one of them. They were neither of them at their strongest, but Nicholls delighted in Singh’s body and received confirmation that the sentiment was reciprocated.  
  
It was only a little effort to keep quiet, to keep the beds in order. Afterwards they kissed and sucked and licked one another’s hands clean, and Nicholls slept easier than he had in many months.

  


The next morning Nicholls wakes with his knee troubling him. The storms are coming closer, then; by mid-day it will be humid enough for his hair to curl. He downs aspirin with a bit of brandy and remains in the house until they’ve taken effect. He’s learnt by experience that there’s little benefit in attempting otherwise.  
  
He decides at the stables to give Lonnie a morning’s rest. Short, hard rides might do a couple of the younger horses good, and both go without any difficulties. Afterwards, he returns to his study and to his half-finished letter, but all his attempts to find words are frustrated. He spends thirty minutes staring at the page, pen poised over the inkwell, before deciding to put it aside for the moment. He has more success at the second part of the underpainting.  
  
By half one the heat has grown intolerable, and James retires to his quarters for the afternoon’s rest. He dozes fitfully under a damp cloth and is roused by the muffled sound of a carriage. Singh, he thinks, hoping to arrive before the heat reached its apex. Now he’ll be negotiating the tonga-wallah’s pay for having to rest here for the afternoon and lose the evening’s business.  
  
Some minutes later, the thick silence is again broken, this time by the opening and closing of doors through the house’s interior. Nicholls pulls himself up to the window and peers through the slat. A moment later Singh enters the inner courtyard. He’s looking well: road-wearied, of course, but plainly fit. Though Nicholls would never give it voice, fear always lurks somewhere in his mind when Singh travels: that he’s had lung trouble or run into some misfortune on the road. Those worries have always proven groundless, but James glad nonetheless that he can put them out of mind instead of fighting to stamp them down, at least for the present.   
  
Singh makes short work of undressing and, to the extent that the dust and sweat make short work possible, washing. There’s a particular beauty about the sight of him bathing in the sunlight: in part the play of light on wet skin and water-bright hair, Nicholls thinks, but more than that the vitality that seems to seep back into his limbs with the relief of cool water. Singh’s back and legs straighten, and there’s a renewed vigour even in the motion of his arms as he washes his body. Nicholls is struck, suddenly, by an absurd urge to rush to his side. The small intimacy of a shared bath gives him inordinate comfort, as though the undemanding attention of his fingers to Singh’s body were capable of saying everything Nicholls would like to say to him but hasn’t the words for.  
  
He resists the impulse, naturally, but he still longs to touch Singh even as he watches him tilt his head back to wash his hair, wishes that he can see the pulse even from a distance. He feels a little throb of disappointment when Singh finishes his bath and binds his hair up under a wet cloth and puts on light pyjamas.  
  
Hardly a minute later, though, there’s a very soft knock at the door. “Come in,” he says.   
  
Singh enters. “My carriage woke you?”  
  
“Yes, but it’s quite all right. I’m glad you’re back, Singh.”  
  
“Yes, and I’m glad to have done with travelling.”  
  
“We’ll have to trade all manner of stories once we’re rested up.”  
  
“Indeed,” Singh says, and he smiles as he helps Nicholls back onto the bed. It’s tall for a charpoy but still a bit ungainly to manage when the prosthesis is off.   
  
They both intend to sleep, Nicholls knows. Still, he doesn’t close his eyes at once but allows himself simply to look at Singh’s face at rest. Even such a small thing as this proximity is sharply missed in its absence. He brushes their hands together and rests his face against Singh’s shoulder, smelling neem oil and the faint, musky scent of Singh’s skin. Singh leans into the touch with a contented-sounding sigh. Nicholls presses a kiss to his shoulder, and Singh one to his head. The hazy, undemanding arousal that Nicholls meant to enjoy in rest begins to turn into something more defined. He listens as Singh’s breathing too grows faster rather than slower. “And here I thought we were going to sleep,” he whispers.  
  
“We can sleep later,” Singh says.  
  
They kiss softly and skim their hands over one another’s bodies, each as if trying to confirm that the other is really present. Eventually Singh stands and removes his pyjamas, not with the slowness of exhibiting himself, but without any haste. He settles himself on the charpoy again, and Nicholls again puts his head to Singh’s breast, feeling against his cheek coarse hair and underneath it a beating heart.  
  
Singh works his hands under the top of Nicholls’ pyjamas, and once he’s mapped that terrain with his fingers they pull the shirt over Nicholls’ head. Singh gives a little grunt of appreciation and pinches one of the nipples he’s revealed. Nicholls gasps and thrusts toward him. “Rest later indeed,” he says, laughing at his own eagerness.  
  
They kiss again, more deeply this time, hands on the back of one another’s heads, on each other’s thighs and between them. Nicholls is close to fully erect, and Singh is not far off him. Singh urges Nicholls to lie down and, at a look of assent, rolls him onto his front. “Trying to get me out of my trousers, are you?” Nicholls says, turning his head so that he can see Singh.  
  
Singh grins for a moment before devoting his lips to kissing Nicholls’ neck, his ears, his throat. He runs his hands over Nicholls’ arms and his shoulders, down his back, again and again, until Nicholls scarcely notices that a cylindrical cushion, ostensibly a pillow, is being pushed under his hips. His pyjama trousers are gone almost before he knows it, and then Singh is running his hands from Nicholls’ shoulders to his thighs, always stopping before the top of the knee. Nicholls can bear to have that place touched now, but he doesn’t prefer it.  
  
But Singh doesn’t linger on his legs, instead stroking his sides, his lower back, his rump. Soon enough Nicholls feels the cushion being pushed at by his own tumescence, as it would be, he sees, if their positions were reversed. Singh continues as he has been for a while, though, then gives Nicholls’ arse a not ungentle smack. By reflex Nicholls parts his thighs somewhat, and Singh rubs a soothing hand over him.   
  
Nicholls reaches for the hand oil he keeps by the window and hands it to Singh, who goes on for a while without using it. He coaxes Nicholl’s thighs apart further and with the other hand fondles his balls and prick. It continues this way until they’re both become sweaty again, and then Singh begins to rub the crevice of his backside. He coats his fingers with the oil and insinuates them between the cheeks, working them apart. Nicholls reaches back to make the task easier, and then Singh’s fingers are circling his arsehole, pressing, pushing in even as his other hand rests on Nicholls’ rump. Nicholls suppresses a whimper and pushes into the touch.  
  
They go on that way for what seems a pleasantly long while before Singh withdraws his fingers and runs a hand over Nicholls’ shoulder. Nicholls rolls onto his back and draws up his good leg. This is both when the loss of the other is bitterest and when it’s easiest not to think of. The arm that Singh uses to support himself obscures that view, and then the sight and feel of above him, on top of him, is the one Nicholls loves best in all the world.  
  
He’s all but beaming, he knows that, and Singh smiles softly and strokes his cheek. For a second Nicholls’ eyes flutter closed, and then he’s being penetrated, slowly, so slowly. He hasn’t let himself become unready during their separation, but six weeks apart will have their effect, and he relishes the dull pain as Singh pushes in.  
  
They’re still for the long moment that Nicholls adjusts to being filled. When he has, he feels a rush of need he’s almost unable to bear. He swallows heavily and nods his assent, and Singh begins to fuck him slowly, shallowly. After a few moments he seems to judge that Nicholls can tolerate more, or else that he can withstand such caution no longer, and begins to thrust in earnest. Nicholls’ eyes fly open and he laughs, begins to stroke himself and then moves on to long, rough jerks. The sight of it has Singh breathing raggedly, moving ever faster. Nicholls feels delightfully like a rag doll being tossed about. He’s close to coming, and he clenches down on Singh as hard as he can. Singh curses and thrusts harder, all but pounding into him. Nicholls jerks himself faster, more roughly, and as Singh comes with a long gasp Nicholls taps at the head of his prick, strokes and pulls again, and then he spills across his chest as Singh collapses upon him.  
  
Nicholls doesn’t know how long they lie there spent and sweaty, the silence filled by the sound of their breathing. In time, though, Singh fetches the basin and cloth that Nicholls, if gifted with foresight, would have put at hand. They clean each other quietly, cautious in touching newly tender flesh, before sleep has downed their eyelids altogether. Nicholls’ head is at Singh’s chest again as he tumbles into a haze of dream and memory.  
  


Ludhiana was full of ghosts for Singh, along with the silent recriminations of the families whose sons had not returned. They went directly to Jind, Nicholls devoting every effort to the mastering of Hindustani. Singh meant to raise purebred horses, and started by acquiring a good first mare and Tamba for a stallion. But influenza had beaten him home by many months. Singh lost a handful of in-laws and cousins, and he was lucky.  
  
There had been no bombs in India, no strafing damage or shelling or tanks. It was that illusion of peace that laid bare what the war had obscured in Europe: an epidemic that cut down the young and the strong, leaving behind children and the old and sick. Breadwinners and homemakers died in in droves. The people they had supported took work that would kill them, hawked rags and heirlooms that no one could buy, begged in the streets.  
  
It was not only men who suffered. With the wage-earners gone there was no money left for the care of horses. No one travelled, no one hired cabs. Nicholls wished he did not know that the English had sold their horses to knackers and the French had eaten theirs (as ever they had done; how many men and creatures had died for the freedom of a snail-slurping nation of debauchees, frog-eaters, devourers of raw meat?), that the Jerries were long since out of horses and pretended that they were not eating dogs.  
  
There was nothing but the sheerest bigotry behind the English saw that Indians venerated their animals while abusing their fellow-men, and certainly ill-treated animals could be found here. Nevertheless, Nicholls found reflexive callousness toward the suffering of creatures to be a European habit. In Jind, even desperate civilians might scrounge an anna to pay those soldiers still available to dispatch their horses, or plead for the favour if no coin could be found. Still more desperate ones abandoned theirs, telling themselves how hardy the horses were, hoping against all probability that they would find a fate better than they now could at home.  
  
So Nicholls first encountered these horses, which were new to him, in a way that was unfamiliar only to Singh: starving in the countryside and dead in the streets. He saw them down to skin and bones and being whipped by people who would never have imagined doing such a thing, whose only hope of subsistence, a subsistence doomed to be cut short, now depended on flogging the last steps of work out of a dying animal.  
  
Nicholls thought he’d grown accustomed to ignoring suffering far worse than what he saw. No: he had grown accustomed to it, and now the custom had grown beyond his strength to maintain. He wanted to be sick the first time he saw a ‘flu-wracked youth beating a gharry horse to move past the corpse of its mate, was in fact fighting being sick when Singh said to his attendant, “How much would that horse sell for if it were healthy?”  
  
There ensued an exchange spoken too quickly for Nicholls to follow at once. He could just make sense when Singh concluded, “Bargain him down to that.”  
  
Vishal objected, as near as Nicholls could determine, that the horse wasn’t worth a single rupee. “I don’t care what it is worth,” Singh said. “What it should be, and not another paisa.” In that fashion they came by several horses. Finders’ fees to the peasants yielded more who had been abandoned.  The horses died, often. Singh and Nicholls knew they would. The horses were bred for desert life, easy keepers who would be more injured by excess than by deprivation, but there were limits to what any creature could withstand, and many had been pushed beyond them. They might survive for a few days or weeks, or even a couple of months, resting in the irrigated shade, being given whatever fodder they seemed able to manage, receiving any veterinary care that could be improvised. And still, unavoidably, many died.  
  
But some lived, among them Kalonji. Against the memories and deaths and the knowledge of all he could not help, her presence was a balm. For all that Nicholls had ever done or failed to do, for all that he still could not, Lonnie would have him groom her or stroke her, would take food from the palm of his hand.  
  


Nicholls wakes later than he should from the afternoon’s rest. Singh is already awake and dressed and is setting out clothes on a corner of the bed.  
  
Nicholls suppresses a yawn. “Were you going to leave me alone here, Singh?”  
  
“I was going to let you sleep.”  
  
“I’ve slept long enough.” He sits up and reaches for the clothes. “Are we riding, then?”  
  
“Once the stars are out, I think. Right now dinner is waiting for us.”  
  
Singh doesn't make to hurry, though, but returns to the charpoy as Nicholls reaches for the hated false leg. “Allow me,” he whispers, cradling Nicholls’ face in his hands. He has done this before, but Nicholls still sometimes fights the threat of tears to come and shame him.  
  
Singh pretends not to notice, though, and attaches the prosthesis with more care than Nicholls ever employs himself. Nicholls stares at Singh’s turban and tries not to look at what his hands are doing. When Singh’s finished, he straightens and kisses Nicholls’ head. “All right?” he asks.  
  
“Quite all right, yes,” Nicholls says. He hurries to put on a proper shirt. “The jodhpurs you’ve got out need mending, could you find me another set?”  
  
Singh does, and they repair to a meal that proves commensurate with heat-induced smallness of appetite. They linger over it, devoting less time to eating than to conversation. News of friends and the like they’ve already exchanged in letters, but some things are best not committed to paper. Some would call them overly cautious, but they would have said the same of others who wound up being prosecuted for the crime of spinning their own cloth.

 

“How is the girls’ school in Ludhiana?” Nicholls asks, meaning the one that’s not run by the Raj.  
  
“Very successful. A new one is going up for next term, and another for girls and boys both.”  
  
“That’s splendid.”  
  
“More or less,” Singh says around a mouthful of dal. “Finding enough teachers who are suitable is difficult.”  
  
“Could you hire any to come in from Lahore or Amritsar?”  
  
“I hope so. I’ve written people there to ask.”  
  
“Miss Winters might have some routes of inquiry in Delhi as well.”

 

“I had thought of that. Will you write her?”

  
“Of course.” Nicholls clears his throat. “I had a letter from James Stewart. There’s a section of it that’s really meant for you.” Singh says nothing, only waits for Nicholls to go on. “It’s under the paperweight in my study, if you’d like to read it.”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
Nicholls gives him time to read the letter in privacy, waiting to join him in the study until Sachin brings the tea. They sip their tea in silence, Nicholls having no doubt that Singh’s mind is as much occupied as his by what to say to James.

 

When the pot is empty, Singh says, “I might give you an enclosure for your reply.”  
  
“Certainly. I’ve not finished it yet, so if you’d like a bit of time...”  
  
Singh worries his lower lip as he does when he’s considering something. “No, I would rather write it now.”  
  
Nicholls concludes his letter while Singh composes his, then folds them both into an envelope that he takes special care in addressing. “There, that’s for you and Jamie,” he says, sealing the envelope. They both know that what’s painful to say is agony to repeat.   
  
A moment lapses while they collect their own thoughts, and then Nicholls kisses Singh’s forehead. “Do you still fancy that ride?”  
  
“Very much.”  
  
They make their way to the stables, where Tamba greets Singh with a head-nudge and a bit of prancing. Lonnie, not to be outdone, whinnies enthusiastically. “My fickle mistress,” Nicholls teases her, and he and Singh share a laugh.  
  
They agree on a route while the horses are being saddled, and then they’re out on the road, the stars coming into view above them. Soon the horses are running up a cooling breeze in their wake, and Nicholls lets himself imagine, for a moment, that there’s nothing else in the world.  
  


 

_As for the rest of it... I doubt you’ve said anything that will come as a surprise to Singh. I’m enclosing for him a note that’s between the two of you. For my part, the war has indeed left us all with too much to forgive. We can none of us bestow at once all the pardon that’s needed, but I hope that you will begin with the measure you owe to none but yourself. I would not see you suffer, Jamie. In all of your dealings with me, there is nothing to forgive._   
  
_Be well._

_  
_

_Yours faithfully,_

___Jim_

**Author's Note:**

> Title credit: Patti Smith, "Horses"  
> Image credits (LJ): fiendunderpin, nomnomicons, fiendunderpin (2x), theidolhands, hel_lansky, fiendunderpin, mysteryof, nomnomicons, werechihuahuas, carnivale.


End file.
